#i like it now

[tenpoints4andy]

hmm?

[6uts]

perturbator / dethroned under a funeral haze (2022) (flashing lights)

[tallmadgeandtea]

Gonna need the Mary Matthew edits to start rolling in IMMEDIATELY

[withoutanumber]

throwing the first punch

[CW: #misgendering #alcoholism]

You are nine years old when you decide that you are never going home.

It isn’t really a decision that came lightly, on one hand -- you would really rather like to go home, after all. You’ll miss your mom, and your bed, and your stuffed chocobo Izzy. You’re not even sure what to do or where to go. Maybe you won’t go anywhere. Maybe you’ll just stay here, pouting next to this stupid rock, for the rest of your life.

Your knees are still bleeding and your arm is really sore, and there are tears smudged on your dirty cheeks. You rub your hands over your face in irritation. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

You want to go home. You want to throw yourself into your mother’s arms and cry your heart out on her shoulder, listening to her sweet voice reassure you and soothe you and try to take away all your hurts, like it used to do when you were little. But you’re aware -- now, more than ever -- that you’ve never been anything but a problem for her to deal with.

(This will be your first encounter with guilt, and your last, in a sense -- because it never really goes away.)

You know that you can never go back. Not after what you’ve done. Those men from the village were right, after all. Tifa is hurt. Tifa might never wake up. Tifa might die, just like her mom had, and it’s all your fault. You should have stopped her from coming this way. You should have protected her.

It’s really no wonder she doesn’t want anything to do with you, when you think about it. She’ll probably hate you for this forever. If she doesn’t die.

The sun is going down. It won’t be fully set over the village for a few more hours, but here in the mountains, the rocky cliffs block out the sun and make darkness fall early. Soon, it will be very cold, and you don’t care because you can’t go home. Maybe a Nibel wolf will come and adopt you. You can be raised as a Wolf Boy in the mountains (the wolves don’t care if you’re a girl or a boy, after all). Then you won’t be anybody’s problem anymore.

In your very deepest core, in a place you’re pretending doesn’t actually exist, you are hoping that somebody will come looking for you. You already know nobody will, because your absence won’t mean anything to anyone.

Except your mom.

She’s probably out of her head right now, you think. It’s late enough, and she’ll surely have heard about what’s happened with Tifa by now. The mayor will be at your house, you think, shouting at her for raising an incompetent piece of trash child. If that’s not enough to drive someone to drink, well, the gods only know what is.

And who will take care of her, if she passes out? Who will clean up the house for her while she’s asleep? Who will crush up the painkillers and bring her water tomorrow morning?

Nobody, that’s who.

You decide to stop fooling yourself. No wolves are going to make you a part of their pack. No one is going to come out looking for you. You stand up stiffly and prepare to head home. A caravan of lights bobs along the passage ahead of you -- someone is out on the paths tonight. You take a different route home and climb in through the back window to avoid being seen.

Mom’s not home. You figure she’s out at the bar. She does that sometimes, or visits Nanna, or whatever. She brought the laundry in, but she hasn’t folded it yet, so you set to work on that.

The people with the lights come back from the mountains after full dark, and you hear people talking outside the front door. A few minutes later, Mom opens the door and comes inside. Her eyes are rimmed with red, and her skirt is dusty. Nanna follows her in, and they both stop dead in their tracks when they see you. You quickly look away, assuming that you’re in huge trouble.

“Baby,” your mother sobs, and you’re in her arms immediately. Her fingers card through your hair, her hands on your back, tears in her voice. She pulls back and puts her hands on your face before kissing you all over your face like she used to do when you were little. “Baby, where have you been?”

She’s never cared when you’ve played out in the mountains before, and you don’t understand why she’s worried now. Nanna’s headed back outside, shouting to the crowd something about the fool of a girl having come home on her own. You are aware that she is talking about you.

You are also aware that all those people were out in the mountains, looking for you.

It turns out that they’re not after you because you’re in trouble, though. After the men who had found you and Tifa and carried Tifa home reported that you were okay, you hadn’t returned. And they thought maybe, just maybe, you weren’t okay. The mayor gives you a thorough tongue lashing, and Nanna has a good deal to say about you never thinking about how other people are going to feel, but that seems to be the worst punishment you get from the adults of the town.

Tifa’s friends aren’t quite as lenient about it, though, when you get back to school. Not that you were expecting any different from those stupid jerks. When one demands to know why you pushed Tifa off the mountain, all you can feel is that bitter feeling of uselessness welling up inside your chest. They tell you that you should have been the one to fall, that you deserve it, and you know they’re right.

You hate them for it. You hate yourself for it.

And when one shoves you and another laughs and says not to push girls, you lose it.

You come home with a fat lip and a bloody nose and bruised knuckles and a rush of heady enthusiasm you can’t quite identify the source of. It was like the lid on all those awful feelings had finally come loose and poured out all over you while you’d been fighting with those guys, and after the teacher had pulled them off of you and punished all four of you, the dark feelings had been...lighter. When they’d spilled out, they’d stayed out.

Mom’s still working when you get home, and as you pass the Lockhart house, you glance up at Tifa’s bedroom window. You’ve only been up there once, and you’re pretty sure you’ll never get to go up there again. But even if Tifa hates you forever, you still...well, you’ll never hate her. You want to know if she’s all right. And so you knock on the door.

Mayor Lockhart opens the door a few moments later. He is unusually disheveled, and he has dark circles under his eyes. You think he’s probably been up all night. His eyes narrow when he sees you, his gaze flicking over your cuts and bruises critically for a moment.

“Can I see Tifa?” you ask.

“No,” he snaps. “Get out of here. And stay out. Stay away from my daughter.”

He slams the door in your face.

You stand there outside the house for a long moment, your hands balled into fists, glaring at the door. You shouldn’t have come here. You shouldn’t have come back at all.

Mom works late tonight and you’re in bed before she can see the bruises on your face. You lie awake in the tiny house, listening to her move around with the lamps turned low so as to not wake you up. She’s been drinking again; you can tell by the way she moves. It’s okay, though. Some of the men get rowdy and angry when they’re drunk, but not Mom. She smiles and sings and pets your hair and tells you how much she loves you. That isn’t so bad.

You’re late for school in the morning because Mom’s been sick and there isn’t anyone else to clean it up.

Tifa’s desk is still empty, and you glare at it all morning. Next time, you’ll be strong enough to protect her, you decide, even if she hates you for the rest of her life. What you are now -- you’re nothing. But that will change. You’ll show Tifa’s friends. You’ll show her dad. You’ll even show her just how strong you can be.

You are Cloud Strife. You are nothing but a problem, but problems can be fixed, and even weak people can change their fates if they work hard enough. You’re full of anger and drive, and you should have stayed in the mountains. But you didn’t, so things have to change.

After school, it’s you who seeks out Tifa’s group of friends, and it’s you who throws the first punch.

[kochei0]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[bookwyrminspiration]

god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

[sylvies-kablooie]

i do unironically think the best artists of our generation are posting to get 20 notes and 3 reblogs btw. that fanfic with like 45 kudos is some of the best stuff ever written. those OCs you carry around have some of the richest backstories and worldbuilding someone has ever seen. please do not think that reaching only a few people when you post means your art isn't worth celebrating.

[qrowpilled]

hate when you find a character whose so infuriatingly Your Type that its embarrassing like yeahg no one is gonna be surprised when i announce this is my new Guy Of The Month

[redstonedust]

i appreciate the attempts a lot of game devs are making with gender neutral character creation, and i appreciate that it's actually a very difficult task to implement that depending on the game's base code. but it's so funny to me when you hear an uproar because some game has "entirely removed the gender option from character creation!!!!!" so you go to check it out and its just like

[lastoneout]

I know this is a tiny part of the wider problems born of diet culture, fatphobia, classism, and racism but like god the idea that "healthy" food must inherently taste bad has completely ruined us as a society.

[thedisablednaturalist]

Im fucking sobbing looking at the new black footed cat at Utah's Hogle zoo

Shes just a fucking baby

Baby with a 60% successful kill rate

[beaft]

can anyone tell me why i enter the grocery store a normal person and emerge as some sort of vile ravening monster

[badolmen]

WARNING 18+

19

[lesbianralzarek]

"life doesnt get better, you just get stronger" does NOT include ages 11-17. life does in fact just get better from there. those years are dogshit. like, you do get stronger but its mostly just a factor of not being 11-17 anymore. positive thinking helps but it doesnt fix whatevers going on at 15, you have to brute force through that one raw

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.